“People didn’t care what we were doing,” Jessica Livingston, partner and co-founder of Y Combinator (YC), noted in the opening minutes of her Startup Grind 2014 interview. The growth trajectory and brand awareness of YC since its simple origins are an important case study for other startups and a confirmation of Edison’s adage: “Success is 1 percent in inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.”
Keep executing and delivering and people will care too — just as YC discovered and shows.
[su_dropcap style=”flat” size=”5″]F[/su_dropcap]rom investing in 8 startups in its initial batch in 2005, chosen from 400 applications when startups weren’t a mainstream thing to do, YC has become a premier accelerator of its kind and the startup sector gained a mainstream boost because of ‘The Social Network‘ movie in 2010 and Facebook’s IPO in 2012. During that time, the stage of the startups that apply to and are accepted by YC has evolved from “just an idea” to those doing their Series A.
Part of this article first appeared in StartupGrind and written by Twain Liu
